Corpus Example: Using an Analytical Framework to Explore Professional Writing in Science Journalism

Abstract

This chapter presents the analysis of a corpus of 38 professional science journalism articles. The analysis is quantitative, that is, it shows how often each strategy is used in the corpus, and instrumental, which means that an interpretation of the texts is offered through the application of the analytical framework for popularization discourse. In this chapter, we include the percentage of use and an example of the use of each strategy. The median of strategy use is 20 (out of a possible 34), with a high score of 27 strategies and a low score of 10 strategies. Some strategies are used in (nearly) every text, such as presenting results/conclusions or hyperlinks, whereas other strategies are used hardly at all, such as references to popular lore and beliefs, and popular culture. Overall, strategies in the themes Subject Matter, Tailoring Information to the Reader, and Stance are used most, with the aggregated scores for the themes Credibility and Engagement being much lower. This analysis provides insights into how popularization strategies are used in a corpus of science journalism writing as a whole.